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With great labor it was brought to the hill-top and hung in this belfry where it rung out daily matins and orisons, filling the lake and hill sides with sweet melody. Now it was one of the rules of the Buddhists that no woman should be allowed to ascend the hill or enter the monastery of Miidera. The bonzes associated females and wicked influences together. Hence the prohibition.
The bonzes were lovers of beauty and of symbolism. They planted the lotus, and the monastery ponds became seats of splendor, and delights to the eye. Their teachings, metaphysical and mystical, poetical and historical, scientific and literary, created, it may be said, the Japanese garden, which to the refined imagination contains far more than meets the eye of the alien.
It is the very acme of studied simplicity, of elegance made out of nothing, of the most immaculate and incredible cleanliness. And while following the bonzes through this long suite of empty halls, we are struck by their contrast with the overflow of knickknacks scattered about our rooms in France, and we take a sudden dislike to the profusion and crowding delighted in at home.
There she keeps letters, various notes written on delicate sheets of rice-paper, prayer amulets drawn up by the bonzes; and above all a number of squares of a silky paper which she puts to the most unexpected uses, to dry a tea-cup, to hold the damp stalk of a flower, or to blow her quaint little nose, when the necessity presents itself.
It has been suggested that Tokimune was not guided in this matter solely by religious instincts: he used the Zen-shu bonzes as a channel for obtaining information about China. Sogen himself, when officiating at the temple of Nengjen, in Wenchow, had barely escaped massacre at the hands of the Mongols, and he may not have been averse to acting as a medium of information between China and Kamakura.
Aged priests, with faces wrinkled by the passage of years, and young bonzes in their slate-coloured gowns, had travelled over the hills and mountains of the North to be present, and took up their positions in the great building.
We have, for example, the begging bonzes, who wear large conical hats of plaited split bamboos, or else hats smaller still and also cone-shaped but made of thick dried grass. They travel all over the district, and sometimes even to distant provinces, collecting funds and information from the people.
At no time, indeed, were the provinces sufficiently peaceful and sufficiently subservient for the carrying out of such a plan by the Ashikaga. The priest Soseki otherwise called "Muso Kokushi," or "Muso, the national teacher" was one of the great bonzes in an age when many monasteries were repositories of literature and statesmanship.
I could not ascertain whether the hog and goat were actually offered up with any ceremony, or simply left to be devoured by the priests. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?" asked Newman, as we were on our way back to the ship. "Yes, I think I have," I answered. "So have I," he remarked, "in a Roman Catholic church. The priests of Rome ancient and modern and these bonzes are much alike.
But Yoshitsuné, the youngest, had no fancy for the life of a monk, and refused to let the razor come near his hair. Though dwelling in the monastery, he was so merry and self-willed that his pranks caused much scandal, and the pious bonzes knew not what to do with this young ox, as they called the irrepressible boy.
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